WATCHING Rodrigo Duterte preside over a midnight press conference in Davao City, I didn’t expect I could stay awake and interested from 11 p.m. to 2:11 a.m. the next day. Even so, as he dismissed his interrogators with the threat of keeping them until 7 o’clock if they didn’t get out of there, the reporters still crowded him, asking questions (including those already asked and answered) not like journalists out to trap a subject in the wee hours but like friends who were just catching up.

DID the five persons who collapsed during a 12-hour outdoor concert last week die “by misadventure”? It was not likely that they willfully died by their own hand. Was it a case of multiple homicide, murder? Mayor Duterte blames the police for failure of intelligence to flush out the drug pushers.

WHEN Cecile Licad lets down her hair – when she’s wearing jeans, a loose Indian shirt and sandals, for example, she sweeps it up into a perky samurai knot on the top of her head and lets the loose strands fall or stick out where they may.

MEDIA’s invention of “presumptive president” as applied to you-know-who – no wonder he insists on being addressed as Mayor – had the Political Innocent in Residence exclaiming that presumptively, Digong’s win will spell presumptive victory for Donald Trump in that parallel universe of our May elections and America’s November polls. (Once upon a time our elections were also held in November, but that’s water under the overpass.)